Project data

Summary of the project

An (accompanying) study was conducted for the Thuringian Ministry of Labour, Social Affairs, Health, Women and Family (TMASGFF) on the Developmental Psychological Counselling (EPC) project. EPB is a counselling concept with which specialists can support and accompany the parents of infants and toddlers in establishing a developmentally beneficial parent-child relationship. The aim of the evaluation/study was to critically reflect on the success of the training programme. In particular, the questions of what benefits the graduates were able to derive for their future work, how they can embed the knowledge in their work and how they were able to develop professionally with the help of the qualification were investigated. A follow-up application was submitted in December 2015 so that the project could be continued in 2016.

On the one hand, a further survey was to include graduates of the continuing education programme who had changed jobs in the meantime in order to examine the proportion of continuing professional development that the EPB continuing education programme had contributed to. This was intended to test the hypothesis that professionals change to more demanding fields of work as a result of this further training. Secondly, it seemed interesting to use cross-tabulations of selected parameters from the responses received from both surveys of professionals to check whether individual trends identified can be attributed to specific items to a particular extent. The following survey categories were used for this purpose:

• Professionals (age, education, fields of work, work regions, professional experience, motives for training, fulfilment of expectations, importance and evaluation of training)
• Use of EPB (frequency, placement authorities, indications, cooperating institutions, social background of families)

This resulted in a variety of differentiation options that could provide interesting insights into the success of EPB in practice. At the same time, more detailed information could be obtained about the strengths and weaknesses of the training from the perspective of the professionals and possible structural limitations for specific groups of people or (regional) backgrounds. For example, it was of interest whether certain occupational groups or fields of work frequently, rarely or not at all apply EPB in practice, particularly depending on the individual assessment and thus the attitude of the professionals towards their further training. Such in-depth findings were to be collected and presented by comprehensively analysing the cross tables. This was realised in cooperation between Nordhausen University of Applied Sciences and the Department of Mathematics at Paderborn University.

The second part of the study took place from April to June 2016 and resulted in a final report, which was presented at a symposium organised by the Ministry of Social Affairs together with scientific background information on its effectiveness.